Multi-Robot Guided Autonomy for Indoor Exploration

摘要

The effective use of multiple Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) in an indoor environment can be challenging due to the several environmental and technical constraints. It becomes more challenging when a single operator is required to manage more than one UGV. Hence, there is a need to look into how this can be effectively addressed and to develop the necessary approaches to testing and selecting the solutions. One approach is to develop guided autonomy capabilities to reduce the amount of operator interaction. This paper presents work done to develop a system to provide multi-robot guided autonomy for enhancing the performance in indoor exploration. The general focus of the effort was to design an Operator Control Unit (OCU) with Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) considerations to address operator loading issues as well as waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities to enable guided autonomy. The system was design to allow a single operator to manage two UGVs. User trials were conducted throughout the development phase to iteratively improve the designs. The results were promising and future work will look at developing task level autonomy to further reduce operator workload and enhancing OCU interface design for operational use.